What Is BitDefender QuickScan

With threats and attacks becoming more versatile by each year, come new security tools that protect users from these threats. In the past one or two years, many security companies have started to utilize the cloud for their purposes, for instance by keeping a large portion of a software's database in the cloud for better and faster updating.

BitDefender QuickScan is a free online service by BitDefender for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer web browsers. It is basically an on-demand scanner that scans what's running on the system for signs of malicious activities.

Probably the biggest advantage that the tool has over apps and programs is that it is really fast and light on resources. Instead of having to download and install a program first, users can simply load the web site to have their running programs checked out right away.

While that's not the most thorough system scan you can get, it should identify resident malware that is running on the system.

When you load the BitDefender QuickScan website in your web browser of choice, you will see an installation dialog pop up right away to install the browser extension that's needed to run the scan.

The scan takes less than a minute after the installation of the browser extension. You will either see that nothing has been found, or that the tested system is infected and needs to be cleaned. The application does not come with cleaning capabilities though, and BitDefender will advertise their own products on the page as the cleaning solutions. If you do not feel like paying money for a solution that could get rid of malware on your system, you could try free scanning and removing alternatives like Dr.Web CureIt which is an excellent program for that task.

The program does not modify or delete files on the system, or documents and other data besides executable files currently running on the system. For most files, it is comparing hashes as it is a lot faster than uploading the files first.

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

About gHacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.